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Brothers Matt and Drew Hambright are a long way from Wall Street.

But they have seen the results of the foreclosure crisis firsthand -- lawns waist-high in places, walls with holes punched in them and lots and lots of junk left behind by families who either didn't have time to pack up their belongings or just didn't care about leaving their former residences in presentable condition.

The brothers run Junk King, one of several junk removal services in the area that have found a robust market for cleaning, or "trashing-out," foreclosed properties during the past two years. But the jobs are very often not enjoyable ones.

"It saddens your heart," Matt Hambright says. "Some of the houses are nice. They have nice items. And you think about someone coming in your house and taking something that you had as your own. But some people, they just don't care and leave everything behind."

The proprietors of such businesses often have little idea of the exact circumstances that led to a foreclosure. But rummaging through a family's belongings, they often pick up clues about their personal triumphs and tragedies.

"Oftentimes, a lot of stuff left behind paints a picture in terms of who might have been there -- number of people who were there, what their lifestyle might have been like," says Steve Turner, general manager in the Triangle region, which extends to Guilford County, for 1-800-GOT-JUNK? "I've had people leave behind Christmas cards, leave behind gifts. So, you get a vague collage of what those individuals may have been like."

Everything including the kitchen sink

Steve Tilman has a picture in his mind of a what a typical foreclosed home is like.

"Smells real musty," the Winston-Salem home inspector says. "Usually a lot of stained carpet. No way to check anything because the systems aren't on. They shut everything down, 'winterize' it. No electrical, no water, no air conditioning running. You see evidence of damage from lack of maintenance."

What happens when a house is left empty with no heating or air conditioning is the interior temperature goes into equilibrium with the external temperature, resulting in mold. Condensation builds up, streaking the walls.

With no one around, gutters aren't cleaned, so water doesn't drain properly and accumulates in the crawl space.

Tilman steps into a foreclosed house in Winston-Salem that his wife had purchased as an investment and walks over to a hallway in the middle. "Watch your step," he says, inside the home near Peters Creek Parkway.

The floor in the hallway sags an inch, like a half pipe. The soil underneath got soft from water, and as the house settled, the girder in the middle cracked.

The place smells like an old basement. The linoleum in the kitchen is curled at the edges. Tilman suspects some sort of fungus is lurking underneath the carpet. But, he says, "this one's actually in pretty good shape, relative to a lot of what I've seen." That includes houses that have been vandalized, broken into and stripped of all their fixtures, cabinets, sinks and toilets.

But at least those homes have usually already been cleaned up somewhat.

What the junk removers see can run the gamut of depravity, some of it created by tenants who are bitter about the foreclosure process.

"Microwave ovens that'll have a pizza half-cooked in it," says Thad Loftin, owner of Junkyard Dogs in Greensboro. "Banisters and stairs torn off. There was an entire room used as an aluminum can disposal, where you had to wade through the cans. The worst was a situation where it looked like a dog had been left in the house and there was dog feces and hair mixed into the parquet floors."

As Loftin didn't actually see a dog, he assumes the owners left one there for a while to make a mess and then came back for it.

He did, however, once find someone sleeping on the kitchen floor of a house he was hired to clean.

"We left and said, 'Sorry, we bothered you,' " he says. "We didn't know who the person was. In a situation like that, you just call the Realtor."

No one has lived there for a long time

When Loftin, who had formerly worked for UPS, started his business in 2005, he went to his bank and asked if they had any foreclosed houses that needed to be cleaned out. They said, Loftin recalls, "There's nothing there, maybe one a year."

This year, Guilford County had 343 real estate foreclosures in June, down 2.1 percent from the same period last year but up slightly from May, according to the Guilford County Business Index.

Nationally, foreclosure filings were down 1 percent from July to August but were still up 18 percent from a year ago, according to RealtyTrac.

As is the case with most junk-removal services in the area, foreclosure trash-outs make up only a small part of Junkyard Dogs' business. Loftin focuses mainly on cleaning out basements, garages and storage units for people who no longer have room for their belongings. These days, though, he does two or three foreclosure trash-outs a month.

In those situations, junk removers are usually contacted by a real estate agent and have no contact with the former occupant of the home, who is supposed to be long gone by the time they come.

Realtor Burton Kennedy, who works for Keller-Williams, says the trash-out process can start anywhere from a few weeks to a few months after a resident leaves. If anything is still in the house, the real estate agent will usually post a notice on the door with a number for the occupant to call if he wants to retrieve his belongings.

"I have had some where I have a feeling that no one has lived there in a long time," he says. "We have houses where it looks like the people just moved out and kept the house clean and fixed up nicely. We have others where it looks so trashed you wonder whether you should bulldoze it. Usually people don't leave them spotless, though, because they're getting out under unfortunate circumstances."

For that reason, some banks offer a "cash for keys" program -- in exchange for leaving the house in relatively good condition, the occupants receive anywhere from $500 to $1,000.

When Loftin arrives at a house, he'll check the perimeter first and then knock on the door to make sure no one is still inside. How big a crew he brings depends on the size of the house and condition of the property, but usually he has four to six people. They can empty a house in about two to five hours. He takes items that are still usable to Goodwill, Habitat ReStore and Handy Capable.

"It's a lot of old newspapers, magazines," Loftin says. "You see some clothing over here, some socks over there, a plant pot turned over. All sorts of mail has been left behind. Pretty much any household item you can imagine."

Cleaning up

The Hambright brothers pull up to a house in McLeansville and back their dump truck to the front door. The grass outside looks as if hasn't been cut for months. Inside, the carpet has cigarette burns and pet stains. It looks like it once might have been gray but now has a color approaching that of caramel. The walls are marred with black scuff marks. The window sills are covered in dust and dead bugs.

"That master bedroom -- you get a nicotine rush just going in there," Drew Hambright says.

When Matt Hambright started Junk King four years ago, he did steady business cleaning debris from new home construction sites. When that business dried up, he started looking into the foreclosure market, which he estimates now makes up about a third of his business.

At the McLeansville house, a one-story, three-bedroom domicile, the brothers discover piles of life-insurance documents, fraud-notification forms and copies of the Danville Register & Bee from April. On the floor are some U.S. Postal Service change of address forms. Eleven cents in change is scattered in one corner.

Matt Hambright goes into a shed in the backyard, where he finds some tools that might be of use to him.

"These look like they might still work," he says picking up some work lamps. "And there's stuff like this tape measure. This costs 10 or 12 bucks. And it's still good."

The brothers rifle through the kitchen cabinets and pull out aluminum foil pans, empty tins and jars. A bottle of seltzer is all that remains in the refrigerator.

They sweep up, lock the doors and throw some PVC pipes and timbers in the back of the truck, which is about three-quarters full. The job took about two hours.

They divide what they collect into items going straight to the landfill and those that can still be used. Matt Hambright says he occasionally keeps some items, such as the tools from the McLeansville home, for himself, but he takes most of what he finds to a ministry with which he works.

Sometimes, however, the previous owner will come back.

"They say, 'Don't take that, that's mine,' " he says. "You kind of get into confrontations, sometimes. ... But you feel bad for the person, so we offer the stuff to them."

Didn't even have time to grab mementos

Loftin says it's difficult to go into a house, see pictures of a family and not think about who once resided there.

"It's a necessary thing that needs to be done, but it's definitely not a feel-good part of our business," he says.

Turner, who oversees 1-800-GOT-JUNK? affiliates in the area, says he remembers going into one house and seeing the children's report cards still stuck to the refrigerator.

"They evidently had a young female, who I think was in elementary school," he says. "It was straight A's and B's, and it was still prominently displayed there with a magnet. And you think, 'Wow, they didn't even have time to grab this,' or maybe it was just an oversight. But that was a good student who lived in that house."

He can also glean much about the interests and tastes of a family from what they leave behind.

"You might see certain type of glassware or maybe a lot of beer mugs," he says. "I remember one house had a cabinet full of beer. You open up a refrigerator, and you might see the person was a vegetarian or that they loved fish, so you get profiles on people."

The junk removers say that regardless of what they find, they try to be nonjudgmental about the people who once lived in the homes. "From our standpoint, we understand these things happen," Turner says.

"We know they happen to good people, unfortunately, who may have run upon hard times. We look at what's left behind, and we may have some discussion about it. But we don't get sidetracked trying to evaluate right and wrong."

Contact Robert C. Lopez at 691-5091 or robert.lopez@news-record.com